"Wilfred," said Samson, feelingly, 'there isn't any man I'd rather have at my back, in a stand-up fight. But this isn't exactly that sort. Where I'm going, a fellow has got to be invisible. No, you can't help, now. Come down later. We'll organize Horton, South and Co." "South, Horton and Co.," corrected Wilfred; "native sons first." At that moment, Adrienne believed she had decided the long-mooted question. Of course, she had not. It was merely the stress of the moment; exaggerating the importance of one she was losing at the expense of the one who was left. Still, as she sat in the car waiting, her world seemed slipping into chaos under her feet, and, when Samson had taken his place at her side, the machine leaped forward into a reckless plunge of speed. Samson stopped at his studio, and threw open an old closet where, from a littered pile of discarded background draperies, canvases and stretchers, he fished out a buried and dust-covered pair of saddlebags. They had long lain there forgotten, but they held the rusty clothes in which he had left Misery. He threw them over his arm and dropped them at Adrienne's feet, as he handed her the studio keys. "Will you please have George look after things, and make the necessary excuses to my sitters? He'll find a list of posing appointments in the desk." The girl nodded. "What are those?" she asked, gazing at the great leather pockets as at some relic unearthed from Pompeian excavations. "Saddlebags, Drennie," he said, "and in them are homespun and jeans. One can't lead his 'fluttered folk and wild' in a cutaway coat." Shortly they were at the station, and the man, standing at the side of the machine, took her hand. "It's not good-by, you know," he said, smiling. "Just _auf Wiedersehen_." She nodded and smiled, too, but, as she smiled, she shivered, and turned the car slowly. There was no need to hurry, now. Samson had caught the fastest west-bound express on the schedule. In thirty-six hours, he would be at Hixon. There were many things which his brain must attack and digest in these hours. He must arrange his plan of action to its minutest detail, because he would have as little time for reflection, once he had reached his own country, as a wildcat flung into a pack of hounds. From the railroad station to his home, he must make his way--most probably fight his way--through thirty miles of hostile territory where all the trails were watched. And yet, for the time, all that seemed too remotely unreal to hold his thoughts. He was seeing the coolly waving curtains of flowered chintz that stirred in the windows of his room at the Lescott house and the crimson ramblers that nodded against the sky. He was hearing a knock on the door, and seeing, as it opened, the figure of Adrienne Lescott and the look that had been in her eyes.